Blog Entry May 11, 2015  

 

In the world of creative thinking and long-term development, for students in particular and especially with software developers, being able to understand the concept of licensing is very important. Any kind of digital product needs to be licensed in some capacity, so that people can understand the kind of rights they have when using, sharing or modifying anything that they find online for their own needs. Typically, this can be broken down into kinds of license – free and open.

 

What are free licenses?

In the context of creative output, free licenses are an agreement made to ensure that a specific criterion is met before any usage of work is undertaken. For example, if someone was to be the creator of a piece of music they might wish to have people view it and share it, and are typically built around some form of crowdsourcing or crowdfunding project. Another big industry that free licenses are used in is the software industry.

This means that people can promote that work and use it pretty much however they wish, however free licenses typically mean that it can only be used, not modified.

 

What are open licenses?

Open licenses, however, are far more diverse. They will typically allow people to use the work in any capacity that they wish, even modify it if they please, so long as original credit is given in the first place. It’s vital that credit becomes a common part of using other people’s work, and open licenses ensure that resistance to doing so will dwindle.

Open content and open licenses are held under a specific license, and can be used for specific projects so long as there is some kind of accreditation. This allows content to become far more open to the public for discovery, consumption, and growth. Unlike using open source ideas, there is no specific criteria that has to be passed for a product to maintain an open license.

 

Is there a difference?

The main difference, really, is that an open product can be edited, improved and re-distributed with new rights that do not match the open license it was provided in. this means that if someone was to take on an open project and add their own spin to it, they could easily fortify their own work by changing the licensing on that specific release. However, bodies to exist to try and change this path; for example, the GNU provide “copyleft” which means that any changed editions out there will have to passed on with the same rules and licensing as the original product that was received.